A couple of other deployment blog posts were JavaScript related. I have extended NiJS with support for asynchronous package specifications, which can be used both for compilation to Nix expressions or standalone execution by NiJS directly. I advertised the improved version as the NiJS package manager and successor of the Nix package manager on April fools day. I received lots of hilarious comments that day! Some of them included thoughts and comments that I could not possibly think of!

The other JavaScript related deployment blog post was about my reengineering effort of npm2nix that generates Nix expressions from NPM package specifications. The original author/maintainer relinquished his maintainership, and I became a co-maintainer of it.

IFF file format experiments

I also spent a bit of time on my fun project involving IFF file formats. I have ported the ILBM viewer and 8SVX player applications from SDL 1.2 to 2.0. I was a bit puzzled by one particular aspect -- namely: how to continuously render 8-bit palettized surfaces, so I have decided to write a blog post about it.

Research

Although I have left academia there is still something interesting to report about research this year. In the past we have worked on a dynamic build analysis approach to discover license constraints (also covered in Chapter 10 of my PhD thesis). Unfortunately, all the paper submission attempts we did were rejected and eventually we gave up publishing it.

However, earlier in April this year, one of our peers decided to give it another shot and got Shane McIntosh on board. Shane McIntosh and me have put a considerable amount of effort in improving the paper, which we titled: "Tracing software build processes to uncover license compliance inconsistencies". We submitted the improved paper to ASE 2014. Good news is: the paper got accepted! I'm glad to find out that someone can show me that I can be wrong sometimes! :-)

Miscellaneous stuff

I also spent some time on reviving an old dormant project helping me to consistently organise website layouts because I had found some use for it, and to release it as free and open source software on GitHub.

Another blog post I'm very proud of is about structured asynchronous programming in JavaScript. From my experience with Node.js I observed that to make server applications work smoothly, you must "forget" about certain synchronous programming constructs and replace them by asynchronous alternatives. Besides the blog post, I also wrote a library implementing the abstractions.

Blog posts

As with my previous annual reflections, I will also publish the top 10 of my most frequently read blog posts:

On Nix and GNU Guix. As with the previous two annual reflections, this blog post remains on top and will probably stay at that position for a long time.